Sunday, March 23, 2008

Running

As some of you know the car has been running and I'm going to try to get this to a real time - so here goes.

I had a bad potbox, here is the the replacement ready to go in. The extra piece of aluminum is because I couldn't mount the potbox as the instructions because the brake regulator is in a different location. The neutral relay was bad and needed to be replaced. The second relay for the charger also was bad and like Tim K. I didn't use it. I intend to go back and replace it but it's not a problem right now.

The motor ran about 30 RPM full throttle. After a couple of emails with Beth @ Azure and switching the encoder direction the car was up. The first test drive was poor. I turned around and changed the parameters that Ross posted on his blog. The cars performance still is poor but I drove it to work a couple of times ( 7 miles each way ) and was working with Beth trying to get the car to keep up with traffic, when I had a battery terminal melt. The lead melted around the bolt that was cast in the terminal. The store claims the terminal was not tighted and I believe the lead broke off with the bolt. I will post pictures next time of the repair.

The problem with the lack of power seems to be the controller cuts the voltage allowed when the voltage in the pack goes down to 138 volts. The battery pack completely charged will drop the first time it is floored to 133 volts. Beth said this is done to get the most out of the pack and based on 12 volt batteries. I didn't see this parameter and asked here to send me a new .ccs file that includes this and the one Tim used to hook up his tach. I'm goig to use one of the regen wires the go to the cabin and hook it to the tach rather the find the wire in the engine compartment. I'm thinking I can move the pin at the controller and crimp a connector--done.

1 comment:

Hmm. I find it a little strange that Beth would say it is because of 12V vs. 8V batteries - it's the same number of cells either way (72 cells). Is it possible she meant 156 vs. 144 nominal volts? I could believe that. Note that everything I've read suggests that 10.5 volts for a 12V nominal batter is the absolute minimum - this translates to 126V for a 144V nominal pack. Which is, in fact, the low-end cutoff that they programmed in my DMOC.

All that said, it is possible to set the ramp so that it *starts* at, say, 133V and still ends at 126V. Dunno what that would do to battery life. It would certainly increase your performance, at the expense of range (due to Peukert's constant)